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WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – THE LIVE EXPERIENCE COMES TO NORTH AMERICA ON A TWO-YEAR ARENA TOUR BEGINNING JULY 11 AT THE TACOMA DOME IN TACOMA, WASHINGTON.
April 9, 2007
Dinosaurs return to the earth in WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience, based on the award-winning BBC Television Series. After playing for ten sold-out weeks in five cities in Australia, where it was seen by an audience of over 300,000, WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience now comes to North America for a two-year arena tour beginning July 11 at the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington. WALKING WITH DINOSAURS
The Live Experience
Based on the award-winning BBC Television Series
Dinosaurs return to the earth in WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience, based on the award-winning BBC Television Series. After playing for ten sold-out weeks in five cities in Australia, where it was seen by an audience of over 300,000, WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience now comes to North America for a two-year arena tour beginning July 11 at the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington.
WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience is directed by Scott Faris, who said, “The BBC Series was a brilliant blend of special effects, escapism, excitement and information. Our show has that -- and it’s live. In this 90-minute show, fifteen dinosaurs, snarling and sweaty, mesmerize the audience – and are as terrifying as they were in life. This is a show that could only fit in arenas – as the creatures are so absolutely immense in size. It is the closest you’ll ever get to experiencing what it was like when they walked and ruled the earth.”
After years of planning, WALKING WITH DINOSAURS came to life at Sydney’s Acer Arena on January 10, 2007. The show has already proved itself such a sensation, that this North American tour was fast-tracked. It begins a scant three months after completing its engagements in Australia.
The creative team is lead by director Faris, a Broadway veteran who has worked side by side with Harold Prince, Trevor Nunn, Michael Blakemore, Gene Saks, John Caird, Tommy Tune and Jerry Zaks.
The creatures are designed and built by Sonny Tilders. The set design and projected image design is by Peter England. The lighting is by John Rayment. The score is composed by James Brett.
Tim Haines, creator and producer of the original BBC series, which was seen by a worldwide audience of 700 million, serves as Project Consultant to the production. The series won six Emmy and three BAFTA Awards.
Ten species are represented from the entire 200 million year reign of the dinosaurs. The show includes the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terror of the ancient terrain, as well as the Plesiosaurus and Liliensternus from the Triassic period, the Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period and the awesome Cretaceous. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus is 45 feet tall, and 75 feet from nose to tail. It took a team of 50 – including engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists and painters, and animatronic experts – a year to build the original production.
Variety said, “The dinosaurs are stunning, life-size and faultlessly nimble. In act one, the beasts parade into the arena gnashing and cavorting as a safari-suited paleontologist describes their attributes … in the second half, the action cranks up, culminating in a spectacular clash as a T-Rex mom defends her baby from predators. Sonny Tilders' triumphant creature design ensures ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ is a truly spectacular spectacular. It is everything a dino-phile could want.”
The 15 dinosaurs of the original Australian production were “hatched” by Tilders, the head of creature design, in a Melbourne Docklands workshop big enough to park a 747. The show took one year to build. The team of 50 artists and technicians are now building a new set of ‘stars’ to tour North America and later internationally. In the United States, the show is so big that the only building large enough to the Tacoma Dome to house rehearsals for North America is the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center!
In fact, the creatures are so large, that the show can only play to two-thirds of the seating of American arenas. Audiences seated in the lower seats are all but overwhelmed by the dinosaurs, while those seated in higher seats view the entire spectacle and panorama of the production.
Scott Faris directed Michael Crawford in EFX at MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, which at its time was the biggest stage production ever conceived, and was on the production team that created Siegfried & Roy at the Mirage Hotel. Faris directed the London production of Chicago, as well as productions of Les Miserables, City of Angels, Cats, Grease and the current national tour of Sweet Charity starring Molly Ringwald.
Faris said, “We go on an incredible journey back in time with a paleontologist. The audience sees these dinosaurs behaving just as they did in their prime – the blood, sweat, and fears with the full range of body movements, and roars and snorts.”
The show depicts the dinosaurs’ evolution, complete with the climatic and tectonic changes that took place allowing them to survive for so long. With almost cinematic realism, WALKING WITH DINOSAURS has scenes of the interactions between dinosaurs, and the audience sees how carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to walk on two legs, and how the herbivores fended off their more agile predators.
The history of the world is played out with the splitting of the earth’s continents, and the transition from the arid desert of the Triassic period is given over to the lush green prairies and forces of the later Jurassic. Oceans form, volcanoes erupt, a forest catches fire -- all leading to the massive comet, which struck the earth, and forced the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Sonny Tilders, who designed and built the creatures has been, for the past decade, one of the major creative forces of the high-tech world of animatronic puppetry for film and television. He was one of the lead animatronic engineers for Jim Henson’s Creature workshop on the Farscape series, followed by work on Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Siths, Peter Pan, Ghostrider and The Chronicles of Narnia.
Tilders said, “Many of the technologies we are using on WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience are borrowed from film. The computer software and hardware we have developed is based on the systems used to control animatronic creatures in feature films.”
“To make it appear that these creatures are flesh and blood weighing six, eight or even 20 tons, we use a system called ‘muscle bags,’ made from stretch mesh fabric and filled with polystyrene balls, stretched across moving points on the body. These contract and stretch in the same manner that muscle, fat, and skin does on real creatures.”
“The puppeteers use ‘voodoo rigs’ to make many of the dinosaurs move. They are miniature versions of the dinosaurs with the same joints and range of movement as their life-sized counterparts. The puppeteer manipulates the voodoo rig and these actions are interpreted by computer and transmitted by radio waves to make the hydraulic cylinders in the actual dinosaur replicate the action, with a driver hidden below the animal, helping to maneuver it around the arena.” Five of the smaller dinosaurs are operated by suited puppeteer specialists, who are inside the creatures.
To meet the technical and creative demands presented by WALKING WITH DINOSAURS -- The Live Experience, Faris assembled a talented team of artists and technicians that are the best in their fields from around the world.
The score of WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience is by James Brett, additional writer, orchestrator and conductor of 20th Century Fox’s Alien vs. Predator and Miramax’s Ella Enchanted. Brett helped create the groundbreaking collaboration between Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony as assistant Musical Director alongside Michael Kamen; the album sold 5 million copies worldwide.
The sets and projections are by the internationally renowned designer Peter England, a frequent collaborator at Opera Australia and the Australian Ballet. He designed the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, was a co-designer of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games Closing Ceremony, designed three City of Sydney New Year’s Eve Celebrations and was a finalist in the international design competition for the Pentagon Memorial in Washington DC.
Lighting Designer John Rayment lit the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games; Hong Kong’s original A Symphony of Light, a massive cityscape permanent lighting display involving over 18 buildings; Singapore’s 2002 National Day Parade stadium event; and Singapore’s Marina Bay annual New Year’s Eve Countdown display. Rayment also works frequently at Opera Australia and has lit 30 productions for Sydney Dance Company.
WALKING WITH DINOSAURS – The Live Experience is brought to North America by Immersion Edutainment.
Contact: Tim Choy, Davidson & Choy Publicity 323-954-7510 ext. 13, t.choy@dcpublicity.com
Adrian Bryan-Brown, Boneau/Bryan-Brown 212-575-3030, abrown@bbbway.com
